X marks the spot/the elephant in the room
What do you see?
I ask this question of my students all the time, and it is almost impossible for them to answer. Last week I taught Wallace Stevens's “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” to my Comp II class (a discussion of the lesson and activity is here). I project the poem on the classroom SmartBoard (or screen share it in Zoom) and read the poem aloud.
Then I ask, What do you notice about this poem—what do you see?
He’s talking about—No, I didn’t ask what the poem is about—I never ask that—I asked, what do you see here?
(long silence from the class)
He’s into nature—No, I didn’t ask you to infer something about the poet—I never ask that—I asked what you see.
(I drink some coffee)
He’s talking about a blackbird.
Well, it’s a start. What takes forever—minutes of leading and coaxing—is getting anyone to say what they actually see. For example,
The poem has 13 stanzas
Each stanza is numbered with Roman numerals
The lines are short
No one ever notices the obvious. Even after 15 weeks of asking this question of every text we’ve read, they refuse to acknowledge what is right in front of them.
Instead, they dive into guesses about situations that are not even in the text—the emotional state of the poet, the childhood experiences of the poet, the emotional state of the poet’s possible children….
It’s frustrating, but I have come to expect it from them.
Who I don’t expect such obliviousness from is me.
To be fair, I’m not really blind to what I see or deaf to what I hear, but I have the intuitive version of ADHD.
I perceive everything.
But rather than creating an appropriate mental taxonomy that orders all inputs by common traits so that I can quickly ascertain kingdoms and families of observations, I throw everything into mental piles indexed by
geographical location at the time of perception
people who were with me at the event
the weather/time of day/season of the year
the side of the page on which said observation occurred
other
My need to feel organized rejects the idea of mental piles but embraces a giant card catalog with hundreds of unlabeled drawers. They’re unlabeled because I like to rearrange the contents, and because I am sure I will remember where I put everything.
For example, in the lower-left drawer I have pictures of a wolf and a warrior—those are together—way in the back of that drawer there’s a sword. These are associated by the “w.” The sword takes up more space so it is in the back.
In the middle-top is a card with the phrase “ambush fear with your ferocious dream.” The card is white card stock & typewritten. I like this so it’s front and center.
There’s a basket labeled “to be filed” on top of the cabinet and in it is a screengrab from yesterday’s Instagram feed: “Jupiter in Aries gives us a boost of fearlessness. Aries, the cosmic warrior, expands our inner warrior.” I took a picture of this because it seemed important, but I am not sure where to file it.
A piece of paper on the floor says “May has the energy you need for breakthroughs, re-activation, rethinking, and recommitting to aligned action in your Work. And first, you must be present to observe” (Leslie Tagorda). And my friend Gena commented on my May 1 blog post that I should remind myself “( a 100 times a day if needed) to remain in the Present Moment! Right here, right now, at this Present Moment, all is okay.”
It all means—No, I am not asking what it means—I never ask that—I’m asking where I should put the wolf and the warrior, the sword and the Work.
Under W, in the drawer marked Elephant.
